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Writing Responsibly Communities in Conversation

 Loyola University Chicago

General Editor: Victoria Anderson

Cover Design: Ryan Eichberger Book design: Donovan+Gilhooley

Copyright 2012 by Loyola University Chicago Department of English

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III

Table of ConTenTs

I. Foundations of Argument

Excerpts from Rhetorica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Aristotle

The Method of Scientific Investigation, 1863 . . . . . . . . . 12 Thomas Henry Huxley

The Choice Fetish: Blessings and Curses of a Market Idol . . . 15 Robert B. Reich

II. Process

Don’t You Think It’s Time to Start Thinking? . . . . . . . . . . 20 Northrop Frye

Shitty First Drafts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Anne Lamott

A Way of Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 William Stafford

How I Caused That Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Doris Kearns Goodwin

Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Nancy Sommers

III. Education

Graduation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Maya Angelou

The Allegory of the Cave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Plato

Everything Has a Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Helen Keller

A Homemade Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Malcolm X

The Case Against College . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Caroline Bird

Dead Men’s Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Chinua Achebe

IV Writing Responsibly: Communities in Conversation

IV. Language

Politics and the English Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 George Orwell

We Are Our Own Metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Mary Catherine Bateson

Two Kinds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Amy Tan

Public and Private Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Richard Rodriguez

V. Challenges

The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Frederick Douglas

How it Feels to be Colored Me. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Zora Neale Hurston

Size 6: The Western Women’s Harem . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Fatema Mernissi

Excerpt from On Seeing England for the First Time . . . . . . 165 Jamaica Kincaid

Class in America—2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Gregory Mantsios

The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Jonathan Kozol

Ambivalent Communities: How Americans Understand Their Localities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

Claude S. Fischer

VI. Resolutions

The Crito . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 Plato

The Ethic of Compassion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 The Dalai Lama

Letter from Birmingham Jail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Martin Luther King, Jr.

Second Inaugural Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 Abraham Lincoln

The Declaration of Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Thomas Jefferson

Table of Contents V

Talking Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 bell hooks

The New Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 Amitai Etzioni

How Social Movements Matter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 David S. Meyer

Called Home. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 Barbara Kingsolver

I foundaTIons of argumenT

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2

exCerpTs from rheTorICa

Aristotle

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arIsToTle (384-322 bC) Aristotle, born in the city of Stageira in 384 B.C., was the last of the founding Greek fathers of Western philosophy. A student of Plato, Aristotle departed from his teacher in his theory of universals; where Plato believed that all concepts and properties exist as distinct forms, Aristotle believed that universals, like color, existed only in the things themselves, rather than as separate forms. One of Aristotle’s most important contributions to philosophy was his introduction of the formal study of logic, collected in the six-volume the Organon. In addition to his pure philosophical work, Aristotle wrote on a breadth of additional subjects. His work in the sciences, including astronomy, geology, botany, biology, and physics, was deeply influential in medieval thinking, while his philosophy was revered by the Scholastic theologians of the same period. In his own time, Aristotle was a prominent teacher, working first for the royal academy at Macedon, educating Alexander the Great and other future kings, and later establishing the Lyceum in Athens in 335 B.C. Aristotle wrote multiple foundational treatises, including Physica and Metaphysica, addressing the general principles and existence of things; Ethica Nicomachea and Politica, concerned with a practical discussion of human living; and Ars Poetica and Ars Rhetoric, on the arts of poetry and rhetoric.

Book I

1 Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make

1

Aristotle | Excerpts from Rhetorica 3

use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit. Both ways being possible, the subject can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously; and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function of an art.

Now, the framers of the current treatises on rhetoric have constructed but a small portion of that art. The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory. These writers, however, say nothing about enthymemes, which are the substance of rhetorical persuasion, but deal mainly with non-essentials. The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case. Consequently if the rules for trials which are now laid down some states-especially in well-governed states-were applied everywhere, such people would have nothing to say. All men, no doubt, think that the laws should prescribe such rules, but some, as in the court of Areopagus, give practical effect to their thoughts and forbid talk about non-essentials. This is sound law and custom. It is not right to pervert the judge by moving him to anger or envy or pity-one might as well warp a carpenter’s rule before using it. Again, a litigant has clearly nothing to do but to show that the alleged fact is so or is not so, that it has or has not happened. As to whether a thing is important or unimportant, just or unjust, the judge must surely refuse to take his instructions from the litigants: he must decide for himself all such points as the law- giver has not already defined for him.[…]

Rhetoric is useful (1) because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly. Moreover, (2) before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct. Here, then, we must use, as our modes of persuasion and argument, notions possessed by everybody, as we observed in the Topics when dealing with the way to handle a popular audience. Further, (3) we must be able to employ

Aristotle

4 Writing Responsibly: Communities in Conversation

persuasion, just as strict reasoning can be employed, on opposite sides of a question, not in order that we may in practice employ it in both ways (for we must not make people believe what is wrong), but in order that we may see clearly what the facts are, and that, if another man argues unfairly, we on our part may be able to confute him. No other of the arts draws opposite conclusions: dialectic and rhetoric alone do this. Both these arts draw opposite conclusions impartially. Nevertheless, the underlying facts do not lend themselves equally well to the contrary views. No; things that are true and things that are better are, by their nature, practically always easier to prove and easier to believe in. Again, (4) it is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs. And if it be objected that one who uses such power of speech unjustly might do great harm, that is a charge which may be made in common against all good things except virtue, and above all against the things that are most useful, as strength, health, wealth, generalship. A man can confer the greatest of benefits by a right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly. […]

2 Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. Every other art can instruct or persuade about its own particular subject-matter; for instance, medicine about what is healthy and unhealthy, geometry about the properties of magnitudes, arithmetic about numbers, and the same is true of the other arts and sciences. But rhetoric we look upon as the power of observing the means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us; and that is why we say that, in its technical character, it is not concerned with any special or definite class of subjects.